


forgive me first love

by mywholecry



Category: Original Work
Genre: Age Difference, First Love, Heartbreak, Hiding, Secret Relationships, Teenagers, Vague Allusions To Real Events, mental health
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-07
Updated: 2012-07-07
Packaged: 2017-11-09 08:11:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/453269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mywholecry/pseuds/mywholecry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When I don't look at you and feel like I'm surfacing from the ocean, I look at you and feel like I'm struggling to fight the waves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	forgive me first love

**Author's Note:**

> This is a weird, shinier version of the first time I fell in love.

Back out of the scene slowly. 

We are not those people anymore.

*

As youthful philosophers with our big eyes and weak chins, we measure out our lives in hands on soft waists and exposed shoulders, in cigarette ash, in words written under white sheets after midnight.

As broken teenagers who only act up in each other's heads, we keep out of the sun and write bad verse on our wrists in place of scars and torn skin. 

Each of our smiles is a battle. 

Every step you take towards me is seismic activity in my ribcage. 

*

Stay with the picture of me at fifteen, and I am taking careful measures not to believe in anything, and you are newly legal and flipping coins in the air above my head:

loves me,   
loves me not,  
loves me,  
loves me still.

On the best days, you tell me that I'm not a kid, but even I can't believe that. I'm in a dangerous situation. I'm a kid, and I'm in the kind of love that makes you want to die a pitched, climactic movie death, the kind of love that ends with poison and daggers. 

You ask me, "Heads or tails," and I answer, "Neither," because I'm not taking any chances.

*

It doesn't take long to stumble into this (we were always afraid of the inevitable, and we were always inevitable). I am quickly learning how to live off shared breath, and I don't know if you understand the stories your fingertips are trying to tell the length of my spine. 

It's the hiding that makes it real, somehow, like if we can pretend long enough that we're acting out a plot, maybe we'll fall into some kind of happy ending. If we're the kind of people who steal away to darkened woods to tell true love tales, then we can pretend it's fight and not flight. If we're the kind of people who lock themselves in attics with the windows painted shut and smoke Marlboro after Marlboro and learn the slope of skin and bones through clothing, then we can pretend that locks and keys are solutions and not problems.

If we talk less, I'm not sure that I notice. You seem to say a lot in hands on wrists and swallowed gasps.

*

Before you leave in the height of the climax, we film montages with the kinds of scenes that get scrapped from other stories, and we take stacks and stacks of polaroids with your grandmother's camera. I'm smiling in each one. I don't remember smiling that much when I go through them years later, submerging each memory under water in the kitchen sink to watch the colors fade. 

When I don't look at you and feel like I'm surfacing from the ocean, I look at you and feel like I'm struggling to fight the waves. 

I get scared a lot. Everything scares me, and you have started drinking the whiskey that you find in your mother's cabinets like it's going to help you understand. When I sit cross-legged and crying on your twin bed, you say, "Hey, hey," and take one of my hands to press between both of yours. It's a stupidly honest gesture, the kind of thing we act out in our elaborate escape scenes, holding hands and kissing cheeks, speaking broken pidgin French. 

Your eyes always look the same, now, and I've been trying to follow the roadmaps you leave on my shoulders to some kind of logical conclusion. Mostly, though, I've been keeping quiet and thinking dark thoughts.

How easy it is to not see something that's always been there.

How simple it is to simply not fight a fire.

*

You do leave. It's okay. Somebody had to leave, and I'm land-locked. This is the only way the story could work: my knees digging into your windowsill, an empty room, no note. 

I wait, though. And then I wait more, and it's sick and romantic in the worst way possible. I'm spending my life on a widow's walk, and I waste my days thinking about building a bomb shelter. I think about digging a hole so big I can climb inside and start hiding again. I’m awfully good at it. Before I learned how to tread water back to reality, I thought if I could wait for days and weeks and months, it wouldn’t be so hard to bite the bullet and make it years.

Now that I've started stepping out into the light again, several summer nights play out in my head like a dubbed scene in a language I've forgotten, a series of unlabeled family photographs of young faces long dead. 

We have to piece together memories so everything makes sense within the narrative, so every scar has a story and a hero and a villain.

 

If I'm being honest, and I always try to be honest in a disaster's wake, I don't know where either of us fit.


End file.
